ABSTRACT
Even with the recent publication of three scholarly editions of her poems,1 Emily Bronte's achievement as a poet remains confused. There are four reasons for this: disorder of the manuscript sources; scholarly emphasis on chronology at the expense of Emily Bronte's own editorial work on the texts; uncertainty about printed and manuscript sources; and the desire to read the poems as proleptically post-Christian - witness Katherine Frank's biography.2 Barbara Lloyd-Evans, it is true, prints the Ashley MS and the two Notebooks begun in 1844, but her edition has many misprints, ignores other manuscript sources, and downgrades the version of the poems published under the name of Ellis Bell in 1846. Janet Gezari gives definitive status to the latter, but prints the other poems chronologically, thus confusing the record of the Notebooks. Derek Roper prints neither printed nor manuscript versions of the 1846 poems but an eclectic text, and he too regiments the poems chronologically. In an attempt to introduce some order into the discussion - it is difficult to follow even as clear and perceptive an account of them as Lyn Pykett's in the Women Writers series3 - this essay will briefly describe the manuscript record; outline differences between the poems in manuscript and the Ellis Bell poems of 1846; outline in general terms the themes and perspectives opened up by the poems, and their technical resources; and finally, using key formulations by Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Bataille, it will attempt to summarize what Emily Bronte achieved as a poet, particularly from 1844 onwards.
